Watch out ladies, your men are quickly catching up to your perfectly filtered Instagram posts, stream of consciousness tweets, and connections on LinkedIn. According to several Pew Research Center surveys, women have historically been more avid users of social media, but it’s 2015, people! And the social media gender gap might be starting to close.
With an abundance of social media platforms ranging from Pinterest to Facebook to Digg, connecting and sharing is easier than ever. But does gender have anything to do with the billions of people retweeting, reposting, and pinning all day every day? According to an analysis done by the Pew Research Center, it does. In 2010, the Center found that 68% of online women were using social media while 53% of online men were using social media. In a more recent analysis, the Pew Research Center found that today in 2015, 80% of online women use social media and 73% of men use social media, a difference of only 7%.
Though, yes, the social media gender gap is slowly beginning to creep to a close, there are specific gender differences with regard to the type of social media platform being used. The Pew Research Center found that Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram have a larger female database, while Reddit, Digg, and Slashdot were mostly male. Although, they also found that the differences between male and female usage on Twitter, Tumblr, and LinkedIn were not significant, helping curve the gender bias.
So what does this mean for the ever-so evolving realm of digital communication? As gender equality starts to make its way into social media, marketers now know exactly where to engage consumers. Want to publicize the latest women’s age-defying moisturizer? Pin it on Pinterest. Want to share the latest and greatest men’s fitness trainer? Add it to Reddit. But, as more and more men continue logging onto sites anywhere from Facebook to Twitter, the playing field has been exponentially expanded. With a broader online audience, social media holds the power to advertise any new gadget or gizmo regardless of gender.
As social media becomes an unbiased marketing tool, the profession of digital communication is bound to diversify as well. Because women have dominated most social networking sites for so long, they have also held most social media jobs. But, as the statistics of men using social media continue to rise, it is possible these jobs will start to be held by males in addition to females. Who would have thought Twitter, Tumblr, and everything in between might possibly help influence gender equality?
With more and more men on social media, the world is now everyone’s digital oyster, not just the ladies’. Today, the things we post, pin, and retweet are seen on a wider spectrum, making the social networking apps we download even more influential than before.
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